Hi

My name is Jeppe Zapp Brandt. I am Danish, married to a Hong Konger, and I design and program GUIs, games, websites and apps. I also dabble a bit in visual art, 3D modeling and electronic music.

What I love about being a software developer

Firstly, every challenge can be everything between an exciting puzzle and a slam-your-head-into-your-desk-repeatedly nightmare. It’s a very diverse job with an inherent unpredictability, which I find very stimulating. There are of course many ways to be a good developer, but to me, and I’m sure many others see it this way, being both a designer and a programmer is the “golden mean”. In this position, we won’t be reading assembler code or developing on the Linux kernel anytime soon, but we can build a game or an application from the ground up, backend to frontend, including mechanics, layout and visuals. This position grants us a wide scope of the development process and a solid ground for making informed design decisions throughout the process.

Designing and organising my workflow, development process, code structure and asset library are other aspects of software creation that I regard very highly, as I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with optimisation and structure. I would regularly reorganise my toys and furniture as a kid, and later on I’d do the same to the documents on the family computer. This tendency has been pervasive throughout my life ans has helped me a great deal in developing software.

Educational background

I got my degree in digital design from Aarhus University, Denmark. The title of this education might seem a tad ambiguous, which is why it’s the perfect name for it. The focus was largely in humanities, i.e. aesthetic and cultural analysis, project management and design processes. Throughout my education I was always interested in the more practical aspect of it, which drove me to learn programming on the side on my own initiative. This gave me certain advantages in my studies and, as I would later come to realise, equipped me with an optimal set of tools for tackling software design and development from several angles.